“No ‘best technologies’ for learning”

When it comes to educational technology, academics often talk about affordances. An affordance is “a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action.” Mobile devices have many affordances lending themselves to new forms of learning. Unfortunately, many people tend to consider these affordances in a vacuum, as if their effective use wasn’t context-dependent. So we get slogans along the lines of ‘iPads improve learning’ — as though they were some kind of glistening panacea for learning.